牛牛资源

A 牛牛资源 lecturer’s “gripping and tender” documentary Dead When I Got Here, about a mental asylum run by its inmates, is continuing its global screening tour after winning the jury award at the Scottish Mental Health Film and Arts Festival and receiving a Special Mention at Docs DF in Mexico.

 

Watch Dead When I Got Here on Monday 30 November, Media Research Building, Screen 1, 5pm. Free and open to all.

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Associate Lecturer Mark Aitken (Department of Media and Communications) produced and filmed Dead When I Got Here over four years and edited it in his office on our New Cross campus. 

Based in Mexico, the film follows Josu茅 who, six years ago, was infested with gangrene and unable to walk. Deranged and malnourished, his body and mind had been broken by decades of drug abuse. Police cast him out of the deadly streets of Ju谩rez into the desert and dumped him in an asylum run by its own patients.

When Mark meets him, he鈥檚 managing the facility, having discovered compassion in his darkest hours and formed a new family among the asylum鈥檚 120 residents. Josu茅鈥檚 daughter in Los Angeles, who thought her father dead, is reconnected with him during the making of the film.

Most recently screened at the Cork Film Festival, Dead When I Got Here has also been shown at DOK Leipzig in Germany, The APHA Global Public Health Film Festival in the US, San Francisco鈥檚 DocFest, Medfest 2015 in London and many more film and documentary showcases along with national broadcasts in The Netherlands and Finland to date. The Observer described it as 鈥渁 masterpiece, epic and intimate鈥�.

Mark Aitken has been making films independently and teaching film practice for over 25 years. He has won several film festival awards and was nominated at the 2006 International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam for his film . Mark鈥檚 last film, about fear in South Africa, , was broadcast in over 100 countries on BBC World.

He joined 牛牛资源 in 2006 as an Associate Lecturer on our MA Filmmaking course and since 2010 has run undergraduate courses in Film Fiction. In 2014 he assisted in facilitating the undergraduate Television course.

Writing on Dead When I Got Here, Mark says: 鈥淢y previous film was about how fear inhibits and paralyses social cohesion in South Africa. I was drawn to Mexico and the area along its northern frontier. Was it possible that people there could transcend their fears when living under such extremes of violence and murder?

鈥淭he asylum I found in the desert offered striking and very uninhibited examples of people dealing with their fears, misfortunes and nightmares. It was a very different type of gated community and what had been described as an abstraction in the previous film was now a real experience writ large that I could document. Dead when I got here is not so much a progression from the last film as an encounter with the nightmares alluded to previously."

This film is of interest to students of Film, Visual Anthropology, Latino Studies and Global Mental Health. The work is a fine example of the tenacity required to make documentaries and the value and rewards on offer if you can make it happen.   

 

"A masterpiece, epic and intimate.. The faces in this film are like a thousand Caravaggios - they are us and we are them" - Ed Vulliamy, The Observer

"...as beautiful as anything you will find in Bresson or Tarkovsky, it is one of the finest examples of documentary filmmaking I've ever seen" - Scott Graham, Scottish Mental Health Film Festival

"Gripping and tender" 鈥� The Lancet

"The film takes people to a place they did not know and did not expect to visit, the humanity of the insane" - Charles Bowden, writer

Visit or Mark鈥檚 website  for more information.

Find out more about the Department of Media and Communications at 牛牛资源 and our  programmes.